Another interesting discovery today is this debate between a linguistic ex-missionary field worker vs. towering intellectual giant on their long stretched battle about recursion & culture-language connection and universal grammar of happiness. I'll give a re-write when I sip through my own factual findings and faith initiatives.

darn! how come I don't have 'come and work among us', like this man and his bosses's tacit understanding ? I wonder if he ever regretted leaving Europe and die in Princeton hospital. I would if I were him. Imagine their treatment of his brain! I bet that wouldn't have happened if he died in a hospital in old Europe.

I can only think of a better design than Chuck's push-down stacks is my poor memory bank striving to replay steps I took on the game board against my imaginary adversaries. I wonder if any master can replay 1000 steps on any normal day against any worthy opponents. It usually won't take more than 200 steps to finish 19x19 game. I've seen teachers play against a dozen students.

This brings back most of maths & Phys I've learned in school. holy cow. I am so rusty. need to visit gobase.org again. "Go forth and spread the good news about τ.

I believe the strongest argument in favor of τ is "The complex exponential of the circle constant is unity." If we surrender to this list of Five-O-Metrics: 0, 1, e, i, τ . The last one can also be remembered as 666 over 106. How awesome can any other order of numbers be?

-$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that.
-You couldn’t run a transactional DB on anything other than Oracle very successfully on 120 cores
-Unless your hosting provider is bleeding money, its going to cost you a *lot* more over 3-4 years than 2.8M to host that. The electricity alone to run that is far more than what you quoted.
-Could you come up with a segmented architecture to run in all on mySQL? Sure, you’d also probably spend an extra $20M in development costs to do it and manage it.
-As far as running a 2 node cluster on RAC – you’d only need standard edition and you’d closer to 30K in licensing then, not 900K.
-Oracle already announced its offering hosted “amazon” like public cloud databases for EE. You can let cat of the bag on your secret… cloud.oracle.com
-No serious company on the Web outsources its hosting. Its a great start up model, but the cost benefit is waaaaay past there when you’re at 2.8M in database licenses. This was Ellison’s knock on Force.com, you end up having to take a proprietary format that you *can’t* take off a public cloud (this is also a problem for Azure)

George Gilbert Sunday, March 11 2012

Mr. DBA (I can’t address you as stupid, since you’re comments are well informed):

“$2.8M would be almost 120 intel cores of Oracle Enterprise Edition at list price. There are well known websites run on half of that”

Amazon’s largest EC2 database instance is “Quadruple Extra Large DB Instance” and it has 8 virtual cores at the equivalent of 1Ghz 2007 class Intel Xeons. So you take that EC2 database instance and then you convert the 8 virtual cores to 4 “Processor Core Equivalents” because of how Oracle accounts for 1Ghz 2007 class Xeon cores.

Enterprise Edition costs $47,500 per processor core and another $46,000 per processor core combined for the Real Application Clusters and Cache options – so that you can run in a configuration similar to a mirrored mySQL with Memcached. That totals apx $400,000 *per node*. So the two nodes in a cluster together total apx $800,000. That gets upsized by a factor of 2.5 to account for peak capacity. Even if the application runs at that peak 10% of the time, you have to pay Oracle *up front* apx $2,000,000 plus 22% for first year maintenance.

- Regarding the running cost of this configuration, the baseline configuration is a total of 16 virtual cores or 2 EC2 max database instances. Amazon’s fully loaded charge for running mySQL in that configuration is only $5.20 per hour. So unless Amazon is bleeding red ink, the electricity is included in that. Similarly, if you upsize that to peak capacity, it’s still only $12.00 per hour.

- Regarding the comment that Standard Edition would suffice, you couldn’t use the Cache option for memory-resident acceleration like Memcached, or any of the other Enterprise Edition functions for that matter.

- Regarding Force.com, apparently they are hard at work at moving off Oracle as the database for their PaaS offering as well as for the core Salesforce.com application itself. Once upon a time Scott McNealy used to boast that big applications needed big Sun boxes and he frequently pointed to Salesforce.com. Then they moved to commodity x86 boxes.

– Regarding building the site or application on a sharded mySQL architecture, you’re right. It is more difficult than using a proper RDBMS where you leave all physical management of the data to the DBMS. However, the default stack and application pattern for Web applications that emerged over the last 10 years was LAMP on sharded mySQL databases. Driven by Big Data requirements, It’s now evolving even further to include even more scalable databases labeled (or mislabeled) NoSQL or NewSQL.

- Regarding running on Oracle Public Cloud, see my response to Campbell Webb above. We still need to see pricing and how non-Oracle software can be accommodated.

The Praemium Erasmianum Foundation has awarded the Erasmus Prize 2012 to the American philosopher Daniel C. Dennett (1942). The theme of the Erasmus Prize this year is ‘the cultural meaning of the natural sciences’. Daniel Dennett is praised for his ability to translate the cultural significance of science and technology to a broad audience.